


The Blue Man Group

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: (im just talking about Hanks pills for his mutant mark it's ok), Adorable Kurt Wagner, Beast Hank McCoy, Body Dysphoria, Body Modification, Developing Friendships, Gen, Self Confidence Issues, Self-Medication, Team Bonding, Team as Family, X-Men: First Class References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-11-02 07:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20661551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Hank is blue, and Kurt is blue, so there's no reason for Kurt not to assume that the two of them make us the blue man group, right?  Hank is not so convinced.But Hank liked Kurt, so he was willing to give it a go, if only for a little while.





	The Blue Man Group

**Author's Note:**

> Hank was a little hard to write but I had this idea and I couldn't get it out of my head, so I hope you like it, even though it didn't turn out too fantastic. Thanks for reading x

Hank was in his lab, as he so often happened to be, and while he wasn’t expecting any quests, he wasn’t going to send any of them away, either. The company was always welcome.

It was late afternoon, and while most people were enjoying their lunch or playing outside in the gardens or trying to master their mutant abilities, Hank was in his lab, where he always was. He was in a peculiar position in the school. He was too old to be a student but too inexperienced to be a teacher, so he was only a member of the X-men with some of the others and the guy Charles came to help in the scientific regard. He wasn’t terribly useful.

But he liked his role, for what it was. He got to interact with both his old friends and some of the younger kids who needed a bit of guidance, while also trying to find his place in the team. He liked being the smart one, the person Charles relied on and trusted most besides Raven, the one everyone turned to for leadership when the older mutants weren’t there.

He liked the younger kids, the new additions to their group after their run-in with Apocolypse. Jean and Scott obviously had something for each other, but they often managed to put that aside in favour of being active and helpful members of the X-men. Ororo brought something new and fresh to the team, and a new perspective for a lot of things, including what true power looked like. Peter was too much too quickly all at once, but Hank liked him well enough, for what it’s worth. And Kurt… well. Hank liked Kurt.

Everything about the modern world was just so wondrous to Kurt as if he had never experienced it. He grew up in a German circus and didn’t interact with many people outside of it, so Hank could forgive him for being so excitable and curious. But while he was skittish, he was also a trouble maker, and that might have been what Hank liked most.

Hank heard him before he saw him. He had his back turned, but he glanced up slightly and watched as the familiar cloud of blue mist floated downwards and disappeared, and he heard Kurt snicker to himself up above. Sometimes, Kurt would play some sort of prank or jump out of the ether to scare an unsuspecting student, all in good fun, of course, but in a school full of mutants, there were bound to be some accidents. But sometimes, he just liked to sit back and watch the world go by, and wouldn’t announce his presence unless he was found. Sort of like a very sophisticated version of hide-and-seek. You wouldn’t find him if he didn’t want to be found.

So Hank decided to just wait it out until the waiting became unbearable. Kurt was patient, more patient than most, and he could sit and observe a very long time. Hank, despite how long he had to wait for results to come through and experiments to finish conducting, was not so patient. It probably wouldn’t be long until their little game ended.

Which came soon enough. Hank wasn’t all that great with waiting for things to happen- it stressed him out too much, made him worried. “Kurt,” he said, and heard giggling from above and behind him. “Come down- you know I don’t like this game.” Truth was, Hank didn’t mind this game, it was almost a battle of wits of sorts, but he wasn’t going to tell Kurt that.

There was a familiar sound accompanied by blue smoke and the smell of sulphur and suddenly Kurt was there in front of him, lounging on one of Hank’s long metal tables, with a cheeky glint in his eye. “You look bored.” He said. “Why don’t you come upstairs and hang out with us?”

“I’ve got a lot of work to do,” Hank said, which wasn’t really a lie. He did have a lot of work he needed to complete, but Kurt didn’t really need to know what kind of personal reasons it was for. “I need to finish this.”

Kurt looked at him strangely, up and down, and frowned. “You’re not blue.”

“No, I’m not,” Hank said patiently. Kurt could be a little slow sometimes, despite his age. He wasn’t used to being around people like the mutants at the Xavier’s School of Gifted Youngsters. The people where he was from wasn’t very kind to him. It must have been strange for him to meet someone who was sometimes a man and sometimes a hairy blue monkey. He doubted that Kurt had ever seen another mutant other than himself until he was thrown into that cage fighting match a lifetime ago, and brought back here to the school to mingle with his kind. “Not at the moment. But I will be, soon.”

It’s not like Hank being a sometimes-human and sometimes-monkey was much of a secret. It was obvious to those who paid any kind of attention, but there would always be those kids who were oblivious, which Hank couldn’t even pretend to be annoyed at. He preferred it, actually. Apparently, Kurt was one of those students. While Hank didn’t expect anyone to know how he actually interchanged between a hidden mutant and a very obvious one, a giant blue monkey was kind of hard to miss.

When Hank glanced at him, Kurt was still looking at him, curious, and looked like he wanted to speak. Hank gave him time. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“How do you make yourself…” Kurt looked up as he hunted for the words that eluded him. “Not blue?”

It was no surprise to anyone that Kurt was always treated as less than for the way he looked and that people often considered him a ‘devil’, despite his blinding faith to the lord, and while everyone knew that Kurt was fine with every part of himself, it was other people’s reactions that he didn’t particularly enjoy. He liked his tail and his lacking toes and fingers and very blue skin. It was what made him. Other people… not so much.

Hank knew he had to speak carefully. Not because he didn’t trust Kurt or was afraid of how he would react, but more so because nobody else really knew apart from the oldest members of the X-men, and Kurt sometimes had a tendency to… speak without thinking. “I wasn’t always blue. And I take medication, to reverse it to what I used to look like.”

The frown on Kurt’s face was so palpable that Hank could almost feel it himself. “Not always blue? How is that possible? I’ve always known you to be blue.”

“Before I met you, I was just a normal man,” Hank said. It hurt a little to remember what had happened, but it was a part of his history, and one he was trying to stop running from. “My mutation was that I had really big feet, and I could grab things with my toes and jump around like… well, a monkey.” Kurt was enraptured. He always did like a good story. Hank continued. “I was sick of the way we were treated. We were different back then, there were less of us. So I made a… cure of sorts. We would still get to keep our mutations, still get to have our abilities and our powers, but our mutant marks just disappeared. My feet would look normal but would do the same thing they did before. Raven could still shift into the form of any other person, but her skin wouldn’t be blue and scaly. We would look like normal people.”

“What happened?” Kurt’s eyes were wide. His tail waved high above his head as he rested his chin on his hands, entranced.

Hank had to look away, down at his work. The memory still hurt to think about. True to his word, the last pill he had taken that day was already starting to wear off, and blue fur was starting to push through the skin on his hand. “Something went wrong. I uh… I still don’t know what it was, even after all this time. But I took it, and instead of reducing my mutant mark, it enhanced it. The exact opposite of what I wanted to do.”

“Wow,” Kurt said, awed. “That’s cool.”

Slowly, they both watched as the pill wore off and Hank’s skin began to darken with blue fur that spread across his body, his form began to expand, his face shifted and elongated into that of the familiar blue monkey. Kurt had seen it all before, and what Hank could do, so he didn’t feel any regret in letting him see the reversion, but it was still very weird to be watched while it happened.

Soon, the only thing that Kurt could see was blue fur and thick skin, and he rose from where he was lying flat on the metal table. “See? I told you it wouldn’t last for much longer.”

Kurt was grinning, a twinkle in his eye. “That’s better.” He said because of course, he would. Whether he was just saying it to make Hank feel better or because he genuinely meant it, the comment was untrue, but not unexpected. “Nice and blue.”

Reaching out, he placed his forearm beside Hank’s and made a small noise in the back of his throat, looking pleased. “See? Both blue now.”

“You’re still a little bit darker than me, I think,” Hank said, unable to stop himself from smiling. Kurt’s happiness was just infectious, and this was one of those times. “And you don’t have quite as much fur.”

“But you don’t have a tail,” Kurt countered. “And you have more fingers.”

Hank laughed. “I guess that’s true.” Kurt beamed and Hank resisted the urge to reach over and ruffle his hair. “We both have something that the other lacks.”

Kurt nodded in agreement. “But we’re both blue.”

“Both blue,” Hank agreed.

That glint was in Kurt’s eyes again, and he glanced up at the rafters from where he had come from, and a wide grin slowly stretched across his face. “You want to race?” he asked, “Up top?”

Hank understood what he was asking. Kurt liked being up high, whether it be in the branches of trees or rafters of buildings or the utmost points of churches. He liked having races too, and he used his attributes to get the most out of the experience. Kurt almost always won, but he never made a big deal out of it, and he didn’t mind losing, either. It was all about the fun, and spending time with the person he was competing against. If Kurt wanted to race, it meant that Kurt missed seeing you, and wanted to hang out for a bit. “You can teleport,” Hank pointed out, mostly to get himself out of the race. He sometimes got a little too competitive. “I don’t see how that’s fair.”

“_Mein freund,”_ Kurt looked offended. “I would never cheat in a race. Where’s the fun in that? It would be…” He searched for the words again. “Unsportsmanlike.”

“You have a tail,” Hank tried again, a little less desperate this time, but no less hopeful. He was always bad at this sort of thing. “And you’re an acrobat.”

Kurt looked at him incredulously, as if Hank’s fur had just changed to bright pink instead of blue. “You’re a _monkey_.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but Hank couldn’t really think of a way to dispute that, because Kurt was absolutely right. They were on an even playing ground, in terms of their abilities, and Hank knew that Kurt wouldn’t actually cheat. He was too honest a man for that. “Alright. But it can’t go on for too long- I’ve got to finish this.”

Neither was sure who won- except Hank knew that he crossed the metaphorical finish line first but only because Kurt let him win- but at the end, both were laughing and vaguely out of breath, and Kurt looked like he had won no matter what. “That was fun,” he said. “And you look a lot less bored than you did before.”

“That’s true,” Hank chuckled as he wrapped a large arm around Kurt’s shoulders and yanked him towards him for a hug. Kurt went easily, laughing along the way, and made a face as Hank gave in to the temptation to ruffle his hair. It stuck up in odd angles and weird directions. “Thanks, Kurt. I’ve got to get back; my work is probably completed by now-”

He didn’t need to worry, because before he had even finished speaking, they were back in Hank’s lab where they were before in a suffocating burst of blue-black smoke and the scent of sulphur, and Hank was a little dizzy when he looked around the lab that was more familiar to him than his own face most days. “Ah- thanks.”

“It’s most alright,” Kurt beamed. Hank smiled back and he nonchalantly leant against one of his metal tables for support. “Anything to help. The blue man group stays together, _ja_?”

Hank almost choked on his spit as he swallowed his laughter. “The- the blue man group? Do you… know what that is?”

“Uh…” Kurt looked very confused. He had an expression on his face that made Hank suspect that Kurt thought it was very obvious. “A group for blue people? Aren’t we the blue man group? We’re both blue. Well, you’re mostly blue, but I think it still counts.”

This time, Hank didn’t stop the laughter that bubbled up inside his chest. “Yeah- sure. We’re the blue man group. I can live with that.”

Before Kurt could reply, there were heavy footsteps from above them and suddenly Scott was running through the door and throwing it open. He stood at the top of the metal stairs, blinking down into the dimly lit room. “Oh- Kurt. I’ve been looking for you everywhere man. We thought you got lost again.”

“Sorry,” Kurt winced. “I forgot again.”

“It’s fine,” Scott put his hands in his jacket pockets and swung his hips back and forth in an attempt to look less worried, but Hank could tell it wasn’t really working. Maybe it was to Kurt, but not to him. “You’re alright, so there’s nothing to worry about. But the Professor wants to talk to us. You want to get going?” He nodded his head towards the door.

Kurt turned to Hank with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, _fruend_, we’ll have to cut this sort. I tend to… wander off. People worry.” He shrugged. “I’ll see you again soon?”

“Sure,” Hank replied easily, and Kurt was at the top of the stairs in a puff of smoke. Scott took a step back to give a now crouching Kurt more space on the stairs. “I’ll see you soon buddy.”

Scott put a hand on Kurt’s shoulder. “Come on- maybe we can still beat Peter over there.”

With a final wave at Hank, Kurt wrapped his tail around Scott’s ankle and both of them were gone in a blink, nothing but the settling blue mist falling against the metal stairs to say that they were even there at all.

Turning back to his work, chucking under his breath, Hank pulled out the newly completed medication from their moulds and put them into their plastic containers. It took a lot of effort to make new pills, and thankfully he took the initiative this time. There was enough to last him a couple of months in this batch.

He held one in his hand, the white startling against the blue of his skin and fur but… he didn’t want to take it, for some reason. Maybe being blue wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe he could cope with being a furry blue monkey for a little while. He put the pill into the container with the others. Maybe he could deal with being a mutant. He liked being a mutant, for what it’s worth. He didn’t need to hide. They were all mutants, all with different marks and abilities. If Kurt could deal with looking like a demon, then Hank could deal with looking like a monkey.

Maybe being a member of the blue man group was a good thing. Or, maybe it was the _best_ thing.


End file.
